Callbox | B2B Lead Generation Services

.+Add.Feed Info1000FOLLOWERS

Callbox is the largest provider of Multi-Touch Multi-Channel Marketing solutions for businesses and organizations worldwide. Callbox is an industry award-winning full service sales and marketing firm. With more than a decade of sales and marketing experience under its belt, Callbox has been consistently recognized as a leader in providing global market access.

Aside from the well-known IT giants, most IT companies and startups are small. However, the pressure to increase their sales and marketing effectiveness, or keep them ahead over their competitors is real. They have to improvise or fossilize, and part of that is improving their lead generation.

The Need for Lead Generation

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any company – it gives businesses the resource where to get prospective customers. When these prospects or leads convert and become customers, the revenues increase as well. (Related: Managed IT Firm Closes $150K in One Campaign)

Moreover, an effective lead generation strategy does not stop there. It continues to innovate and optimize techniques and strategies that yield satisfactory conversions for IT companies.

Adding Valuable Content for Your Target Audience

Consumers these days do their own research before they make a purchase decision. They need to know that a certain service or product will solve their pain point or not.

IT companies can put themselves out there by adding value for their target audience and addressing their pain points. Content should address how these businesses in the IT service arena can boost their business, reduce expenses, improve their efficiency, and help them innovate.

Through valuable content, IT decision makers will be able to:

Exactly find out what the business needs through case studies, specialist research, news, and articles.

Make technical requirements much easier through product testing, demo, and how-to content.

Analyze products and services through product demonstrations and presentations as well as through peer reviews.

No matter what niche or industry it is, the most effective lead generation strategy is dynamic, relevant, and data-driven. It is accomplished through monthly goal setting based on website traffic, prospects, leads, and customer acquisition.

Lead generation should be consistent, always improving and innovating. Always analyze your conversion rates from various inbound marketing sources so you can pinpoint what fits your business best at the least cost possible.

IT companies can further improve their leads and sales-qualified conversions through metrics. Make it part of your strategy to review leads from:

Social media

Press Releases

SEO

Pay-per-click

Websites

Advertising

Referrals

Email campaigns

Overall marketing efforts

Use the data you get from these places so you can achieve your goals better and improve your results.

Consistent Lead Scoring and Validation

The most effective way to gauge the level of your target audience’s interest is through evaluation of their behavior on your site and their interaction with your other demand generation strategies. You can further qualify leads better for your sales team if you score them based on their progress through the customer journey funnel.

Automating your marketing processes will help you effectively gather data from your users and their activity. It will also help you automatically attach a value to each new lead you have. Moreover, automation can easily help you identify those who are ready to buy. It also helps your marketing team trigger workflows and sends appropriate communications based on your leads’ activities, behavior, and interests.

Users are always expecting a positive experience every time they interact with your site or brand. After all, they are looking for convenient and effective solutions. These are conversion opportunities that, when addressed properly, will improve your conversion rates.

With this in mind, you have to deliberately make an effort to create your landing pages, website, and content engaging, impactful, and inspiring for your prospects. Most of the time, users use their mobile devices to access sites and will make a quick scan of it.

You can improve lead capture by creating well-designed landing pages, call-to-actions, and forms. Make your forms quick and painless to increase your conversions. You should focus more on accessibility and convenience rather than novelty.

Consistency is the word when it comes to lead generation. Whether you are in the IT sector or any other industry, all lead generation efforts will go down the drain if they are not consistent. That, coupled with the suggestions we gave you in this article, can help you bring your lead generation efforts to the next level.

Author Bio:

Judy Caroll is a marketing executive at Callbox. She is a blogger, online marketer and loves to share with you the best stuff in sales and marketing. Follow Judy on Twitter and Google+.

You can get almost any kind of information on the Internet — from the most useless trivia to building a house. For this reason, a lot of people embark on DIY projects although the results are not always positive. Companies, too, are jumping into the DIY route especially when it comes to lead generation, thinking they can save more when they do.

However, not all DIY projects ended happily and satisfactorily. You can see memes of DIY disasters all over the Internet. Who could miss the “expectation vs. reality” GIFs?

It’s the same with B2B businesses – you’ll never know whether your DIY lead gen campaign can end up well or not. Unless you already have a dedicated in-house lead gen team, doing a DIY is a dangerous business. Worse, it can even kill your business. Here’s why:

Lead Generation Takes Time

The significant and long-lasting impact of your lead generation efforts takes time. It will require you to invest a great deal of your time and effort before you see any tangible results.

In the same way, DIY lead generation will take the same amount of time and effort or even more. If you don’t have a lead gen team, you might soon see that you are spreading yourself or your staff (whoever is assigned to) too thinly. You might even get distracted away from the main core of your business.

Sometimes, you might be able to meet the rigors of a lead gen campaign at the beginning but have difficulty following up since it will require a great deal of attention. Moreover, lead generation campaigns need a significant amount of learning curve that will consume more time before you can apply them practically.

Lead Generation Requires Specialized Technology

Your business might be using a variety of technologies and platforms that have different functions.

How many marketing-specific tools does your company use?

Here’s the question, though — how many marketing-specific programs does your company use? The answer varies on the size of your business but if you are a small business, the answer is most probably very few or none at all.

If you are already struggling with your tools, how can you expect your lead gen campaign to be successful?

If your business is experiencing growth, you will need more people. The hiring process can impede your growth because you need time looking for the right person to handle the additional responsibilities. On the other hand, the growing work can overwhelm you, and you could hire the wrong person because of haste.

If you have managed lead gen, however, you can add qualified experts within a short span. They can easily integrate with your company flow with little or no supervision needed. It saves you money from training new staff and needless errors.

Because consumers are different and they can change their minds quickly, and also because strategies need to evolve, you can’t be stagnant with your lead generation campaign. You need to bring it to the next level, and that’s where the pipeline strategy comes in.

Pipeline strategy analyzes marketing and sales data, so your goals and decisions are based on revenue. A reputable lead generation service is well-qualified to use this strategy to keep your sales up and generate revenue for your business.

More so, these experts have the flexibility to adjust according to the changes in businesses by increasing or decreasing your leads according to your requirements.

Don’t DIY; It’s Time to Call the Experts

Why attempt a DIY and place the business you have worked for at high risk when you can have experts and professionals who have the technology and experience that will bring your business to the next level?

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Outbound touch points delivered via emails, phone calls, events, direct mail, and other paid channels play a key role in ABM. When combined with other tactics, direct outreach activities add a proactive component to the tasks of identifying, engaging, and converting new accounts.

But in order for targeted outreach to work its magic in an ABM setting, you need to know how outbound channels exactly fit in a modern account-based marketing process.

That’s what we’ll talk about in this blog post. We’ll take an in-depth look at specific roles that direct channels can fill in an ABM program. Then, we’ll discuss concrete steps for you to integrate outbound channels into these functions.

So, how can outbound channels move your ABM process forward? In a nutshell, there are five particular ways targeted outreach accelerates finding and winning new accounts:

Gathering insights that help tailor your approach and your offer to a potential account’s specific needs and interests

Building and growing meaningful relationships with each stakeholder through personal, one-on-one interactions

Delivering relevant content and messaging to the right decision maker at the right time

Providing a consistent and coherent brand experience across the different stages of the sales funnel

Achieving true marketing and sales alignment throughout the entire ABM process, from start to finish

We’ll go over each item in detail below. But first, let’s talk about why ABM needs outbound to work properly.

Why Outbound Drives ABM Success

If we step back and revisit what ABM means, it’s easy to see why outbound naturally supports account-based marketing efforts.

We use ABM to find and target accounts with the highest potential value, then build a thorough understanding of each potential customer, so that we can match our overall strategy and product to what the target company needs.

This means treating each account as a single target market, with all stakeholders involved in the buying process as the target prospects. This, in turn, requires having the right data and insights, mapping relevant content, and establishing interconnected relationships with each individual in the decision-making unit (DMU).

That’s where outbound channels make a difference in ABM. Targeted outreach amplifies your ABM efforts by helping you focus on specific opportunities through scalable, one-on-one touches. While inbound channels work well for broader ABM activities, it’s going to be outbound tactics that let you pinpoint and engage each opportunity.

Now that we know the why, it’s time to uncover the how. We’ve already seen five crucial roles that outbound marketing plays in ABM programs. Here’s a more detailed look:

1. Account profiling and research

As Marketo points out, data is the foundation of a successful ABM strategy. That’s because data enables authentic personalization, allows more granular segmentation, and makes marketing and sales more closely aligned with each other.

This makes ABM programs very data-intensive and data-driven, requiring dozens of data fields and hundreds of data points to carry out tasks like developing and keeping track of ideal account profiles and target buyer personas.

Targeted outreach is an ideal source of data to fuel your ABM strategy. They allow you to acquire and verify information straight from target decision makers in real-time. For example:

Email activity and responses can provide insight on each stakeholder’s product fit and interest.

Live phone conversations help you gain a deeper understanding of your overall target account and the stakeholders themselves.

Event marketing initiatives are excellent sources of information to measure how far along the buying cycle your target prospects are.

Successful ABM initiatives are also based on building genuine relationships with stakeholders and being able to leverage these relationships not only to convert prospects into customers, but also to turn them into brand advocates.

Sigster argues that authentic relationship is everything in ABM. Unlike traditional marketing where the priority is to push as many leads as possible into the funnel, ABM emphasizes finding the people you really want to engage with. That’s where building meaningful relationships comes in.

One of ABM’s primary goals is to deliver the right content to the right stakeholders so that they’ll move from one stage in the sales funnel to the next. The idea is that relevant content drives buying decisions more effectively than any other messaging approach.

According to a recent study from Ascend2, around 62% of marketers mention personalized content as a top-performing ABM tactic. Results from a CEB survey of B2B marketers also reveal that individual stakeholders are 40% more likely to buy from a vendor that provides content tailored to their interests and needs.

But content can only take you so far. Marketers who put out content on their company website or social media communities have little control over the actual audience each piece of content reaches.

In ABM, this isn’t good enough. Content still needs to cross the last mile to the appropriate audience. Because targeted outreach enables direct, precise interaction at scale, it’s an ideal way to deliver relevant content.

Nurture emails can be used to distribute resources to stakeholders at different stages in the sales funnel.

Targeted phone calls are an effective channel for content syndication.

A Demand Gen Report survey finds that almost 60% of companies think their buying cycles have increased, while a Brightfunnel study published last year indicates that it now takes 52% more marketing touches to close a deal.

This means that engagement is now more crucial than ever at moving potential customers down the conversion funnel. Stakeholders need to stay engaged throughout the sales process in order for them to approve your offer. Otherwise, they’ll simply leak out of your pipeline.

As DemandBase points out, somewhere around 83% of companies say that ABM’s main benefit is that it helps them improve their engagement with target accounts.

Because outbound channels work well at connecting with stakeholders at almost any point along the buying cycle, they’re ideal touches for keeping decision makers consistently engaged:

Sales provides the needed insights for knowing which accounts to prioritize and which stakeholders have a real impact on buying decisions. With this info, marketing then draws up content maps and works out when and how to deliver relevant content to each stakeholder. Both marketing and sales then follow this plan for communicating and interacting with stakeholders in the target account.

Targeted outreach helps marketing and sales better align with each other through:

Bringing the two teams closer together by flexibly adapting to a potential customer’s buying process

Improving sales reps’ trust and confidence in marketing-supplied prospects, since each prospect remains closely engaged throughout the sales funnel

Allowing richer conversations and follow-ups for sales as a result of deeper research and insights from marketing

Looking to step up your ABM game? Callbox’s multi-touch ABM solution can help you find and win your most profitable customers. We combine outbound and digital channels to identify, expand, engage and convert high-value accounts. Contact us today.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Writing sales emails is probably not your idea of spending Valentine’s Day, but it doesn’t mean you can’t get into the loving spirit while preparing your drafts and templates. The next email you send out just might be what you need to move the sales process forward – if you put your heart into it, that is.

How exactly do you win over B2B prospects through emails?

But how exactly do you win over B2B prospects through emails? Today’s infographic shows 15 proven ways to generate more opens, click-throughs, replies, and conversions. These best practices cover 5 crucial requirements of a compelling B2B email:

Just like dating, wooing prospects through emails requires impeccable timing. You need to know the right day and time to send out emails, as well as determine how frequently to stay in touch.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule that tells you the ideal email sending schedule, and different studies in the B2B marketing literature can suggest vastly different email sending times and frequency. This means you’ll have to determine this based on your own experience and requirements.

Fortunately, marketing project management platform CoSchedule has published extensive compilations of various studies on optimal email schedule and sending frequency, which we can use as starting points to time our emails more effectively:

The best day to send emails is Thursday, and the best time is from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

You should send no more than 5 outreach emails each month and 1 email newsletter each week.

3. Striking the right balance between content and design in the email body

Now that you’ve gotten your recipient’s attention, it’s time to bring your email’s main message in front of your audience. Getting your message across means applying the right mix of content and design elements on your email body.

The email body is where you deliver what your subject line has set out. It’s where you build the case for taking the action specified later in your CTA, so the components of the email body all need to move toward that direction.

There are millions of possible copywriting angles and design choices you can make when developing the email body, and only a handful will actually have a direct, positive impact on engagement, response, and conversions.

The following email body best practices are supported by recent research in B2B email marketing:

Email messages that have between 50 to 125 words generate response rates of more than 50%.

Emails written at a third-grade reading level have the highest response rates, fetching 17% higher response rates than emails written at a high school reading level and 36% higher response rate than emails with a college-level writing style.

A quick glance at messages in a typical inbox is enough to tell us that most marketers tend to treat closing lines only as an afterthought. Closing lines play a more important role than simply providing a place for you to sign off.

For emails with a conversational tone, signing off with “Cheers” yields a 54.4% reply rate.

5. Enabling recipients to act and respond with a clear CTA

Anyone who has seen at least two dozen rom-coms will eventually notice that practically every movie in this genre includes a climactic scene where one of the lovers chases down the other and make a grand speech in some comically unsuitable setting.

While the CTA resembles the climax to a story, it’s very different from what happens in a film. Your email’s call-to-action sets the stage for the next step in your relationship with a prospect. It’s where prospects decide how the rest of the story plays out.

Conclusion: Use these 15 email secrets on your next send-out or campaign, and win the hearts and minds of your target prospects.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Whether we admit it or not, we’ve all dreamed that we are launching the next hottest product like Apple. Its story as a company which started in a garage becoming a billion-dollar corporation is every startup’s dream.

At the heart of it all is lead generation – without it, your new product or service will not go far. In fact, your business will die without a steady stream of new customers.

Which Lead Generation Tool Works Best for You?

We have established how important lead generation is to any business, and you can utilize many tools and strategies to guarantee success. But with the number of tools to choose from, which one is the best for you?

You will be surprised that experts have varying opinions about this — some will say social media while others will choose SEO among others. The reason behind this is the target audience is different and each of them has their own biases.

Therefore, a survey conducted by an SEO agency will be significantly different than the survey conducted by an email marketing provider.

The truth, however, is you can try using all of them and conduct a test which one works for you. And while there is no strategy that cures it all, there are best practices you can use to gain traction with lead generation.

How to Effectively Use Your Tools?

You think that the product you’ve built is awesome and have features which your target audience can greatly benefit from. So what’s the most effective way to pique their interest and keep their excitement going?

Your Story is More Important (The Power of Content Marketing)

An old Hopi proverb said that “he who tells stories rule the world.”

Experts agree with this – storytelling is powerful. The most successful brands have mastered the art of storytelling.

That’s because stories appeal to the emotions. They teach a lesson without exerting a lot of effort. They take people into the future. They make your brand more real. More so, stories are unassuming.

People won’t be interested in reading the specs and features of your product no matter how brilliant they are. On the other hand, if you incorporate those features in your copy or video, you can get their attention, especially if it appeals to their emotions.

An example of the power of storytelling is the Land Rover Sport’s Dragon Challenge. Just by completing that dangerous challenge alone speaks volume of what type of car the Land Rover is — reliable, powerful, and carefully engineered; a car highly vetted by champions. The video has garnered more than 5 million views on YouTube.

Another example is Burt’s Bees, a company that sells natural body care products. Instead of telling people the features of their products, they focus on the benefits of using natural ingredients.

Nowadays, a lot of companies — big names or startups — gain traction by pre-selling their products even before it is formally launched in the market. Those who buy before the launch enjoy extra benefits or receive a welcome gift.

You can send out emails or announce it on your social media accounts that you are building a waiting list.

You can also emulate the pre-launch strategy of the commission-free stock trading app, Robinhood. A year prior to their product launch, they were able to build a waiting list of one million people. Now, that’s some lead generation strategy!

What did they do?

They sent prospective clients invitation-only early access to a private beta of their app instead of joining a mailing list. It attracted attention because it allows a selected group to have a peek.

Get the Press and the Influencers to Talk about Your Product (Press Release, Word-of-Mouth)

No matter how great your story is but if nobody is talking about it, it’s nothing. And there are no other people you want talking about your product first than the members of the press and the influencers.

When they(influencers) start talking about your product, expect people to follow.

These people are already experts in reaching out to people and getting stories out where people can see them. And when they start talking about your product, expect people to follow.

Don’t wait for your product to launch before you connect with these experts. Instead, build a partnership with them early on so when the launch date comes, you already have people who know your company, your product, and what you do. Thus, you can get wider coverage in different channels and platforms.

A successful lead gen campaign knows how to integrate the different tools and channels to your advantage. It is also a constant experiment of what works and what doesn’t. So don’t stop innovating and testing because what works today might not work tomorrow.

Aside from that, you should also consider the launch date of your product. For example, launching it before a big expo could be better because you don’t have competition. An expo might be a good platform but because there are also a lot of products, they all vie for attention and consumers can get easily distracted.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

But most of the bright spots on Sunday’s telecast came from the nearly 50 or so minutes of commercials aired during the broadcast. Both marketers and non-marketers know all too well that national ads make up a huge part of the Super Bowl’s appeal, with many even suggesting that commercials bring more entertainment value than the gameplay itself.

51% of the Super Bowl’s audience tune in for the commercials rather than for the action

In fact, a Nielsen survey of 25,000 households reports that 51% of the Super Bowl’s audience tune in for the commercials rather than for the action on the field. With viewership numbers ranging more than 100 million, that’s a lot of unblinking eyeballs to reach.

That’s why advertisers continue to shell out over $5.1 million for a 30-second ad spot, with 2019’s total Super Bowl ad spending projected to reach a cool $450 million.

This year’s parade of ads featured many different themes which I find really interesting, like the empowerment of women, subtle (and not-so-subtle) references to AI’s rise, and nostalgia-inducing 90s throwbacks.

Commercials aired on Super Bowl LIII also shed some much-needed light on a key activity we do as marketers: lead generation.

But the most important takeaways from commercials aired on Super Bowl LIII also shed some much-needed light on a key activity we do as marketers: lead generation. The best ads from Sunday’s broadcast teach a few key lessons to help us consistently score a lead generation touchdown:

1. Interact with (don’t just reach out to) prospects

Expensify’s ad spot shows the best use of inbound and outbound channels to engage prospects I’ve seen so far. The ad features Adam Scott and 2 Chainz in a real-life business situation where having a tool like Expensify really comes in handy.

Aside from hitting the right notes in terms of promoting the product while keeping it engaging for its target audience, the spot also scored some serious marketing points by being the only interactive commercial among all the Super Bowl ads aired last Sunday.

Viewers get a chance to win giveaways by using the camera scanning feature in the Expensify mobile app to scan receipts for items shown throughout the video. The ad also increases viewers’ chances of winning by letting them invite others to sign up for Expensify via a special link.

For B2B marketers, the lesson is clear. It’s not enough that you simply reach out to leads where they are through multi-channel marketing. You also need to make sure they respond and engage back. That requires a bit of interaction.

A key reason why the Tide commercials became such a hit with audiences last year was that the ads were shown on multiple spots, one in each quarter, making Tide’s presence felt throughout the whole event.

This year, a number of advertisers followed Tide’s example, most notably T-Mobile and Bud Light, with ads running in all four quarters. Brands like Google, Michelob Ultra, Verizon, Toyota, and WeatherTech each had two spots.

When taken together, Google’s two Super Bowl ads, “Job Search for Veterans” and “100 Billion Words”, both gave a deeper meaning to what the tech company can offer, especially with the way they tout the impact their technology has on people.

I’ve written about humanizing and not just personalizing lead generation touches before. Personalization is such a key lead generation tactic, and marketers automate much of the personalization process to make it scale, that we run the risk of handling leads and prospects as mere database records.

Amazon took a fresh approach at an old Super Bowl staple: Alexa-themed jokes. In the tech giant’s star-studded “Not Everything Makes the Cut” ad, Amazon held up a mirror in front of itself and poked fun at the Amazon Echo’s current state of affairs—with all the cringe-inducing hilarity you’d expect from a robotic butler in its early stages of development.

As marketers, we always make sure to position our product or brand in the best possible light. But by focusing too much on ensuring that everything moves like clockwork and that things be as precise as possible, we’re losing sight of the fact that prospects listen to humans and, more importantly, they buy from humans.

4. Make things part of a bigger whole

Right now, the average marketer relies on 8 different channels to generate leads and uses at least 20 tools in their marketing tech stack. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, as today’s marketers juggle different roles and responsibilities in the lead generation process. That’s why most of us marketers simply can’t see the forest for the trees.

But a tactic, campaign, or program won’t amount to anything if they don’t fit into a bigger whole. A tactic needs to fit in a campaign, a campaign in a program, a program in a strategy, and so on.

The impact of the most effective Super Bowl ads start way before and go well beyond their 30-second spot. That’s because great Super Bowl commercials are always part of an even bigger campaign or ad strategy.

Take, for example, the widely-lauded NFL 100 Super Bowl ad where we see this idea in action. Also called “The 100-Year Game”, the add celebrates the NFL’s upcoming 100th season with noteworthy cameos and scenes, enabling the NFL commercial to win USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter.

The 100-Year Game | SBLIII - YouTube

5. Understand that no pain means no gain

We all know that pain points drive purchase decisions in the B2B world. Lead generation success depends on how well you can identify your prospects’ wants and needs. Only then will you be able to present a solution and kick start the process of turning the prospect into a customer.

Hyundai’s Super Bowl spot “The Elevator” shows some clever uses of pain points to position their product as a potential solution. The commercial showcases Hyundai’s Shopper Assurance Program, an app designed to make buying a car as hassle-free as possible.

The Elevator | 2019 Super Bowl Commercial | Hyundai - YouTube

While the B2B buying process isn’t as linear or simple as car shopping, the basic idea is really similar. Capturing and converting leads at different points in the funnel require clear understanding and communication on pain points.

Conclusion: I think it’s only fair to say that ads really made last Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast enjoyable. With these five lead generation lessons, it’s been very educational, too.

What was your favorite Super Bowl LIII ad?

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

A sales campaign involves hitting different factors on different fronts. However, we have to realize that in this day and age, the digital front is one area that you really have to pay attention to.

There are a lot of things that you can deploy in order to boost your multi-channel customer experience and all of these contribute to the end of goal of maximizing your lead generation strategy.

Why Digital Lead Generation?

The attention of people is getting shorter and shorter as the years age. What meant minutes to get the attention of an audience a few years back is now down to at least 8 seconds according to studies. Simply put, marketers have to be keen in coming up with a digital customer experience that will generate immediate positive responses from the target audience.

Your digital customer experience should possess the following characteristics:

Clarity

Optimization across various touchpoints

Excellence

Data fluency

Here are the benefits of a well planned digital customer experience:
It gives companies the ability to track and monitor customer behavior at various digital touchpoints.

Generating helpful vital information about your potential customers is of utmost. Digital customer experience has the ability to measure and constantly keep an eye on the preferences and buying behavior of the target market.

This information may include basic demographic snapshots, basic contact details, common responses to marketing initiatives, lifestyle, the usual time of social media usage, preferred account to use, history of past transactions, and possible communication history with the brand concerned if applicable.

An effective and well planned digital experience platform should have the capacity to gather all of these data and give each significant department of your business access to them. Having this kind of technology working for your business gives you an undeniable edge over your competitors.

It also means that the departments involved in the operation are seeing one and the same data that are constantly updated. Imagine being able to grow your business steadily just by using this wonderful piece of technology made available to this present generation.

When intending to give your potential clients a digital customer experience, naturally, you would want to make such a massive impression that they will never forget your brand. Making a lasting impression also means establishing a certain degree of connection with the clients enough to make them go to the next level – customer engagement and conversion.

At the end of the day, you would want your target clients to make an action concerning your brand.

The business is able to offer customers several choices of services that are suited to their situation.

Your target client can choose to either use web chat, video or voice options in order to understand your product better. Whatever is most comfortable to your potential client is made available to them and made even more accessible and easier.

If you want your target clients to respond to the digital customer experience the way you hope and expect them to, make sure to do the following:

Integrate your marketing tools.

An integrated marketing data will benefit your business in more ways than you care to imagine. When you think of integrating your available marketing tools, think of efficiency and a high success rate. These two will be made possible because your different departments will be working faster than usual because of the convenient availability of updated data.

Before you think of even starting to design your digital customer experience, it pays to know what thrills them in the first place. You should know by now that some approaches you use with an older age group do not work well with a younger bunch of people vice versa. Do your homework and study what keeps them interested.

It pays to be prepared. You are not only saving time, you are also saving on your monetary resources when you hit the target right where you should.

Get your people on board.

Your whole team should be clear about your objective and plans. Some initiatives do not work out well simply because not everyone on the team is on board. Meaning, there is a tendency for business leaders to overlook the importance of communicating strategies and timelines to members of the team who should be in the know.

Educating your whole team about data analytics, for instance, equips them to be able to respond, plan out, measure, and process data properly. If some member of your team does not have an appreciation of basic customer data such as buying behavior, this can be a big blow to your business eventually.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Qualified leads have always been the best way to prospect for new business. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use qualifying questions to gauge your current prospects.

A sharp and smart sales and marketing person knows how to ask qualifying questions that will reveal the situation and pain points of a business or person. Knowing their issues will allow you to also identify what they truly need in order to address the problem. Armed with this knowledge, you can make better sales presentations.

Here are some of the most effective qualifying questions that sales and marketing people have been using for so long:

1. How can we help?

You will be surprised at how impactful this question is. Most people who need help will not volunteer the information. They tend to really wait for someone to ask them first. And being asked this question is like a light at the end of the tunnel – there is potential to get answers, the possibility of finding an actual solution.

While it may appear too vague at the beginning, it is your task to filter what you hear and make mental notes of important details. Quite often, there is a need to ask for follow up questions like:

How long has this been going on?

Who is responsible for this?

What is your role in all of this?

Who else knows about this?

What has been done to address it?

The list of follow up questions can go on and on. It’s up to you to ask the right ones at the right time.

Get your prospect talking about what’s pulling them down or keeping them from getting to the next level. It can be a work culture, a person, a faulty protocol, a lack of technology or a problematic one, a need for more people, training, or software applications that will make them more efficient.

Whatever revelations you get from asking this important question can help you position yourself better when making a sales pitch. It allows you to target a specific need and offer a workable solution at the same time.

3. What task mostly eats up your work hours?

This question will help you identify manageable bumps along the road. If a manual task eats up most of the time of a key person in the organization, maybe you can offer automation tools. It is also possible that a computer system in dire need of an upgrade may cause delays and hold-ups on the day-to-day tasks of an employee. Sometimes, all a company needs is an outsider to look inside and iron out some wrinkles.

You can be that person who will iron out the wrinkles. You can offer a sound solution that will allow employees within the organization to work efficiently with a little help from promising tools.

4. What is a recurring topic of discussion during your management meetings?

Mostly, it’s the pressing issues that keep on coming up during important meetings. And when people in management repeatedly talk about something consistently, it simply means they have yet to find a solution to the problem. Being able to offer this solution will be a welcome development for them.

5. Is there anything you usually complain about?

This kind of question has the potential of opening the floodgates. This often touches a sensitive spot and an employee who is given the opportunity to speak about something that makes things difficult for him would be more than willing to share. It may not necessarily be something that directly involves him, it can be a gripe about someone else in the office or practice that does not make people productive.

Whatever it is that people in the organization often complain about, it is definitely something worth looking into.

6. What is your boss mostly meticulous about?

If you cannot go straight to the higher-ups, ask other employees what concerns in the office are leaders mostly focused on. This will allow you to gauge the priorities of superiors and what they do in order to address certain issues.

7. What are your biggest challenges in the organization right now?

Challenges, when viewed as opportunities, can make you a very happy salesman. While others may find it a deterrent to growth, introduce a fresh perspective and teach them to see it as an opportunity to do something new. Asking this question might require touching on some sensitive things, but it just might be what they need in order to find a permanent solution to the problem.

If you want to find solutions and make a sell, it all starts with asking the right questions.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

B2B marketing requires a different approach in the way you execute things. There are usually multiple stakeholders involved the B2B buying and in this article, we discuss why you should start engaging everyone that’s involved in the decision-making process.

Here are the reasons why it is important to engage every relevant decision maker in B2B lead gen marketing:
1. It will save you time.

B2B sales can be a complex experience because you know all too well that there are multiple stakeholders involved. This would mean that engaging them for a potential business transaction will be subjecting yourself to a lengthy waiting game. Decision-making, you can imagine, will not be easy.

Getting the message to multiple stakeholders, however, will allow you to make your presence felt and possibly save some time. Instead of waiting for all of them to make the time to discuss with you as a group, make the time to reach out to them individually.

2. You can make a sound assessment of their decision-making process.

Taking the initiative to reach out to the stakeholders allows you to more or less assess who are the decision makers, the business sponsors, the economic buyers, the influencers, and the technical buyers.

This move will also allow you to identify who among them are aggressive, laid back, agreeable, easy to work with, difficult to convince, and skeptical. You can make sound improvements on your gameplay when you have a grasp of how these stakeholders operate.

3. You get to connect with everyone.

Making the connection always matters. Whether you decide to build a relationship with one, two or all of them eventually, it also helps to have a network in the B2B industry. You can never tell who will come in handy for your business in the future.

If you want to be able to successfully engage stakeholders in B2B marketing, you have to learn how to identify which ones function in a certain way. Start out by identifying as many as you can. Categorize them based on your initial encounters and do your background check thereafter. Whatever information you get about their line of business, remember to classify them as well.

Your ultimate goal would be to find out who is the big time decision maker among all of them. Naturally, when you do identify this person, you would want to work closely with him. This is not saying that the others will no longer matter. Maintaining engagements across multiple decision makers promotes discussion amongst them and moves the sales process forward faster.

In the meantime, stick with the ones who are primary movers in the business. This is not about taking a short cut, this is about being strategic every step of the way.

Here comes the tricky part. Once you have engaged these stakeholders, you need to be able to specifically assess certain things about them. This may require a bit of practice if you are doing this for the first time. You have to be able to make mental notes about the contents of your conversation, body language, gestures, expressions, etc.

The assessment process will include identifying the following:

1. What their role is in the decision-making process?

You need to be able to tell the difference between a negotiator, an information gatherer and a key contributor. You can look for hints. Be mindful of how your conversations go. Ask around about the person you are talking to.

2. What is the key deciding factor for them?

What is the key element that influences their decision? When they do decide, how does this decision affect or relate to the other stakeholders? Are they influenced by a certain principle? Do they have an internal agreement?

3. How strong is their influence over a decision?

Are the stakeholders able to steer the decision towards what they want? Are they dominant in the decision-making process? Are they quiet? Do they submit easily? Do they put up a good defense? Do they appear weak to the rest?

4. Their attitude towards you

Were they accommodating? Were they evasive about some questions? Did they look like they were interested in what you were saying? Their attitude toward you will say a lot about how they do business.

5. Your key value to their business

Try to ask yourself about what would be the biggest contribution of your product to their business. Try to determine whether your product will be a solution to a long-running problem in their business. Or will it be a deterrent to their development?

Conclusion: By applying just a few of these steps you’ll find out how you can really get things going for your customized B2B campaigns. The added revenue and the connections are more than worth the effort you’ll put in the beginning.

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Just as how things like machine tools and interchangeable parts helped usher in the Industrial Revolution and eventually led to the age of information we’re now living in, it’s also clear that outsourcing has helped accelerate this entire process.

As businesses and their activities grew more and more complex, it soon became clear that companies needed outside help to operate. This started in manufacturing where one company relied on the products and labor of another to make their operations more efficient.

There’s a shortage of marketing talent as the growth in marketing responsibilities outpace the available talent pool. (LinkedIn)

Marketing now plays newer and expanded roles. Marketers are now expected to perform sales, IT, product development, and other business responsibilities. (Salesforce)

As a vital part of your business process, you need to manage outsourced marketing effectively. That’s what I’ll share with you in the rest of this post. We’ll go over seven practical ways to ensure success with your outsourced campaigns using lessons I’ve learned from my experience at both ends of the outsourcing table.

1. Align your expectations right from the outset

One of the first things I always set out to establish with new clients during the early stages of a campaign is to outline the project’s expectations. These are different from the project’s goals and objectives in that expectations tend to be more qualitative.

For example, defining the scope of the relationship (one-time vs. ongoing) is a key expectation that needs to be mutually set. Another important expectation to define is the specific steps in your marketing activities that the project covers along with branding guidelines.

2. Set clear and specific goals together

All of us know that goals form an essential component of any project. For outsourced marketing campaigns, in particular, goals need to be jointly set and mutually agreed upon by both you and the outsourced agency.

When fleshing out a campaign plan with new clients, my team makes it a point to uncover the customer’s business objectives, available budget, and implementation timelines. From these pieces of information, we can then work out well-defined, measurable, and realistic objectives for the project.

3. Designate who makes and owns specific marketing decisions

There’s one thing that I tend to notice in almost all of our highly-successful projects. These clients placed their full trust in our team and put us in a clear position to make and own key marketing decisions.

From campaign to campaign, I work with different point persons (from SMB owners to marketing VPs). The most successful ones are those where both my team and the client have clearly outlined and set who does what.

4. Embed the outsourced agency with the right internal people

No matter how seasoned or capable your chosen agency may be, they’ll always lack that insider knowledge and feel for your marketing processes and audience that only your internal people have. That’s why it’s important for the agency to team up with persons in your company who have the expertise they need.

For example, when creating campaign materials, the outsourced team will need to closely work with the right people to help them carry out prospect research, customer profiling, and product familiarization. Integrating campaign workflows will also require close coordination between the outside team and persons in charge of your tech stack.

5. Avoid micro-managing the project

With a very crucial business function like marketing, it can be difficult for some companies to place their complete confidence in an agency’s expertise. This oftentimes leads to clients micro-managing every component of the campaign which, in turn, results in delays and setbacks.

It’s important to understand that outsourced marketing programs require the full trust and confidence of both parties to succeed. So, thoroughly screen potential agencies and only choose the one you’re comfortable working with. Once the project starts, have faith in their expertise and be sure to respect their autonomy.

6. Make sure to stay engaged all throughout

Letting the agency take the driver’s seat doesn’t mean you can leave the whole project on autopilot. Trust also requires verification, so you really need to stay engaged and involved throughout the outsourced program.

When handling outsourced campaigns, the most productive ways that clients remain involved in the process include giving feedback, raising concerns about performance, bringing new information, and following up on agreed-upon milestones.

Manage and monitor your Callbox team and campaign’s performance with Pipeline CRM

7. Implement a proper communication plan

Outsourcing is all about communication, communication, communication. But communication goes beyond connecting and keeping in touch. My experience has taught me the right and wrong way to keep communication lines open throughout an outsourcing project.

Determine the channels and frequency of your communications

Always offer context when communicating

Understand that being responsive is not the same as being available 24/7

Take language barriers and time zones into account

Choose the tools and time schedules for real-time communications

Support communications with visuals such as screenshots, flowcharts, and data visualization

Make sure to document and archive your communications with the agency

Conclusion: The success of any outsourced marketing campaign depends on a whole host of factors. But one element that you can control is how you manage the whole project. No matter how reputable or experienced your partner agency may be, the campaign won’t amount to much without your involvement.

If you have other pieces of advice to add about managing outsourced marketing campaigns, I’d love to read about them. Just let me know through the comments and please feel free to shoot me your questions.

Author Bio:

Rebecca Matias is a Business Development Manager at Callbox. She is a proactive marketer who is willing to share her passion, leadership principles and craft in marketing. Follow Rebecca on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.